Neither Am I Supported By The Sight Of Some
Skeletons, The Raw Material Of That Grewsome Artistry, Deposited Whole
In Their Coffins In The Niches Next The Ground, Though Their Skulls
Smile So Reassuringly From Their Cowls; Their Cheeriness Cannot Make Me
Like Them.
But my companion seemed to be merely interested; and I
fancied her deciding that it all quite came up
To her expectations,
while I translated for her from the monk that the dead used to be left
in the hallowed earth from Jerusalem covering the ground before they
were taken up and decoratively employed, but that since the Italian
occupation of Rome the art had fallen into abeyance. She said nothing,
but when we came out she stood a moment on the pavement beside our cab
and confessed herself a New England girl, from an inland town, who was
travelling with relatives. She had been sick, and she had come alone, as
soon as she could get out, to see the wonders of the Capuchin church,
because she had heard so much of them. We said we hoped she had been
pleased, and she said, "Oh yes, indeed," and then she said, "Well,
good-bye," and gently tilted away, leaving us glad that there could
still be in an old, spoiled world such sweetness and innocence and
easily gratified love of the beautiful.
Taking Rome so easily, so provisionally, while waiting the eventualities
of the colds which mild climates are sure to give their frequenters from
the winterlands, I became aware of a latent anxiety respecting St.
Peter's. I did not feel that the church would really get away without
our meeting, but I felt that it was somehow culpably hazardous in me to
be taking chances with it. As a family, we might never collectively
visit it, and, in fact, we never did; but one day I drove boldly (if
secretly) off alone and renewed my acquaintance with this contemporary
of mine; for, if you have been in Rome a generation and a half ago, you
find that you are coeval not only with the regal, the republican, and
the imperial Rome, but with each Rome of the successive popes, down, at
least, to that of Pius IX. St. Peter's will not be, by any means, your
oldest friend, but it will be an acquaintance of such long standing that
you may not wish to use it with all the frankness which its faults
invite. If you say, when you drive into its piazza between the sublime
colonnades which stretch forth their mighty embrace as if to take the
whole world to the church's heart, that here is the best of St. Peter's,
you will not be wrong. If you say that here is grandeur, and that there
where the temple fronts you grandiosity begins, you will be rhetorical,
but, again, you will not be wrong. The day of my furtive visit was sober
and already waning, with a breeze in which the fountains streamed
flaglike, and with a gentle sky on which the population of statues above
the colonnades defined themselves in leisure attitudes, so recognizable
all that I am sure if they had come down and taken me by the hand we
could have called one another by name without a moment's hesitation.
Every detail of a prospect which is without its peer on earth, but may
very possibly be matched in Paradise, had been so deeply stamped in my
remembrance that I smiled for pleasure in finding myself in an
environment far more familiar than any other I could think of at the
time.
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